Review of the TeamGroup 256Gig USB 3.2 Ver 2 USB Flash Drive

Topic

New Reply

[PL1]

I purchased it through Walmart (for the points) but the seller is Newegg $26.99

It gets confusing with the naming of USB Flash Drives these days. I recently purchased a Micro Center Branded 256Gig USB 3.1 drive and it was a lot slower than my previous Micro Center Branded 128Gig USB 3.0 drive. Plus, when I went to exchange it, the clerk showed me that they ALL say USB 3.1 even though the website says USB 3.2 Gen 1. So, I went shopping.

The fastest current drives are the USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives. From my shopping, most of the 256Gig drives are at least $50. One review I read mentioned the TeamGroup 256Gig and although it did not reach the advertised speeds, it was also a lot cheaper than the others and performs pretty well considering.

I found that the biggest hurdles are the hard drive on your system. I have a couple of USB 3.0 ports on each of my computers. None of them are USB 3.2 Ver 2 ports. That might be necessary to get the advertised speeds of 1000MB/s read & 800/MBs Write.

I have an NVME drive that Crystal Mark shows as being 1700MB/s write speed, while my 300/MBs mechanical drives show a 135/MB write speed. I store my backups on the mechanical drive, so I’m getting about 110MB/s real world transfer rates. Which, is still a lot faster than the 30MB/s I was getting with my old USB Flash drive.

What I AM contemplating doing is to upgrade my storage to an NVME drive, now that I know I can actually get 275MB/s with this combination. But, it is not really necessary, since I usually do backups after an MSFT update and copy to my USB drive afterward.

It’s just that I DO LOVE that speed! So, I may just do it for the heck of it. I currently have a 256Gig NVME boot drive that I could replace with a 2TB NVME drive for about $100.

1) Image of the Crystal Disk Mark for the TeamGroup 256Gig USB 3.2 Ver 2

2) Image of the Crystal Disk Mark for my Kingston NVME 256 Drive

3) Image of the actual transfer rate from the NVME to the TeamGroup

4) Image of the actual transfer rate from a spinner drive to the TeamGroup

5) The opened package

• This topic was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by PL1.

Reply | Quote

Replies

PL1 wrote:

I found that the biggest hurdles are the hard drive on your system

How so? Your NVMe reads at over 3GB/s and the USB writes at less than 0.5GB/s.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

Paul T wrote:

PL1 wrote:

I found that the biggest hurdles are the hard drive on your system

How so? Your NVMe reads at over 3GB/s and the USB writes at less than 0.5GB/s.

cheers, Paul

You are correct about that particular situation. In my particular situation, I have a boot drive that is NVME while my storage is on mechanical drives. I will be transferring from the mechanical drives and the fastest speed would be 110MB/s. That is why I was saying, in this case, the drive is the limitation. If I swap out the mechanical drives for an NVME drive, I could bump up the speeds to 275MB/s.

Also, looking at possible upgrades to NVME, my motherboard only supports PCIe Gen 3×4 vs. PCIe Gen 4×4, which cuts my maximum available speed.  So, there are a lot of variables to what speeds I can attain. The CPU, the Motherboard and the drive you are transferring from. My Motherboard and CPU are from 2015, so that is an issue.

Reply | Quote

PL1 wrote:

the fastest speed would be 110MB/s

How often do you copy enough data that it is an issue?

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

Paul T wrote:

How often do you copy enough data that it is an issue?

Whenever I do my backups, I make a copy from two backup programs to my USB drive, on four computers. So, it’s not THAT often and it is why I’ve been trying to decide if it is worth the upgrade. Money is tight right now, and I know it’s not worth it, but I may increase the size of my NVMe drive in the future while eliminating the SATA drives.

BTW, the SATA is probably the bottleneck in my case since copying from SATA to SATA produces the same 110MB/s speed.

Also, I just noticed there is a more recent PCIe Gen 5 x 4 and those few drives that I saw were about $300 for a 2TB drive!

Reply | Quote

How much time are you going to save? 10 minutes?
When I run manual backups I let them run while I get on with other things on the same computer, so don’t notice the time.

Having 4 computers running I would use a NAS. If you have spare drives a bare NAS can be had for $150 or less.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

The 256GB Kingston DataTraveler Max USB 3.2 is also a good choice in the same price range.

After reading a review on Tom’s Hardware that showed it was ~3×faster than the SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.2 I was using, I purchased two of them direct from Kingston for $26.86 each back in Oct.

CrystalDiskMark verified they were right about the speed difference.

Scandisk

Kingston

I also noticed a huge difference in how long it takes to copy a video file to them (the Sandisk took ~5 mins to copy a 2 hour video from my “internal SDD” while the Kingston only takes ~1.5 mins.)

Another nice feature is, unlike the Sandisk, they’re available with either a USB-A or USB-C connector.

Reply | Quote

That’s an EXCELLENT deal for a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps). I really like the Kingston brand. I don’t know if you noticed, but my Crystal Disk Marks above were for the 256Gig NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen 3×4 Kingston drives. Had I known about that one, I would have bought it instead. <g> As it is, I just placed an order for a second Team Group flash drive.

The other thing I noticed is how fast it loads for backup image recovery. It is instant. My next test is going to be recovering a backup from the USB drive to see how fast it completes. I’m thinking it should be quick at 275MB/s vs. SATA speeds of 112MB/s.

Reply | Quote

Hey Y’all,

Just a couple of points to consider.

• As always the slowest component in the chain will control the speeds you get, e.g. Internal Drive, USB Connection, External Drive. It doesn’t matter how fast your External Drive is if the USB Connection is slower.
• I purchased a Samsung PCI Gen 4 NVME 1Tb 980 Pro and placed it in an external ORICO adapter, using a Realtek RTL9210 controller. When doing large transfers the thing just crawls! Sequential Write Speed can be a bugger on solid state memory devices once the DRAM cache fills up, if the drive even has a DRAM cache.

IMHO NVME drives are not suitable for EXTERNAL storage. In fact I’m not sure about 2.5″ SSDs as external storage.

I mostly stick with good old school 3.5″ bare HDDs. They are inexpensive and reliable. I currently have 9 that I rotate for my backup needs. I use an external USB 3.0 Dock that accepts 2.5″ & 3.5″ drives. I had been using 1tb drives but will be slowly switching to 2 tb drives as my backups are getting larger…gotta do a cleanup one of these days!

FYI: the Gen 4 drive will wind up as the boot for my next machine as soon as I can justify it…

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

Reply | Quote

RetiredGeek wrote:

IMHO NVME drives are not suitable for EXTERNAL storage. In fact I’m not sure about 2.5″ SSDs as external storage.

IMHO NVME SSDs are perfect as external storage. I use Samsung 2TB T5, 4TB T7 for years. The T7 is connected to my laptop 24/7/365 reading/writing.

Reply | Quote

I also have a T7 but it is not a NVMe driv whiche. The spec sheet states it is USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Bbps) which would be the limiting factor if you have a 3.2 connector.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

Reply | Quote

As a follow up, I just recovered a 42Gig backup directly from the
TeamGroup 256Gig USB 3.2 Ver 2 USB Flash Drive to my PC’s internal Kingston NVME PCIe Gen 3×4 drive and the recovery took about 1 minute. Normally, restoring from an SATA drive, the recovery takes about 8 minutes on my system. So naturally, I intend to restore from the USB drive from now on.

Reply | Quote

RetiredGeek wrote:

I also have a T7 but it is not a NVMe driv whiche. The spec sheet states it is USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Bbps) which would be the limiting factor if you have a 3.2 connector.

Transfer massive files within seconds with the incredible speed of USB 3.2 Gen 2 on the T7. The embedded PCIe® NVMe™ technology facilitates sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,050/1,000 MB/s, respectively, making the T7 almost twice as fast as the previous T5 model.

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/portable-ssd/t7/

Reply | Quote

Hey Y’all,

Been busy setting up my new MinisForum Venus UM790 Pro but now that it’s up and running I thought I’d do some testing since I have both USB 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports.
I also tested with different drives and cables to sniff out the “weakest link”!

So here are the results:

Control: Crucial 128Gb 2.5″ SSD in external case:
Using USB 3.2 Gen 2 port and cable marked USB 3 SS.

First up Samsung T7 1Tb USB 4 Cable marked 10G:

Samsung T7 1Tb USB 3.2 Gen 2 Cable marked simply SS:

Samsung T7 1Tb USB 3.2 Gen 2 Unmarked cable:

Next up Samsung NVMe 990 Pro 1Tb USB 4 Cable marked 10G:

Samsung NVMe 990 Pro 1Tb USB 3.2 Gen 2 Cable Marked 10G:

Samsung NVMe 990 Pro 1Tb USB 3.2 Gen 2 Cable marked SS:

Samsung NVMe 990 Pro 1Tb USB 3.2 Gen 2 Cable Unmarked:

Can you find the “Weakest Link?”

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

1 user thanked author for this post.

TechTango

Reply | Quote

I really can’t say except the obvious unmarked cable.

One tip when testing is you might want to increase the test size to at least 32Gig. Maybe even 64Gig. That’s because some NVMe drives slow way down when their buffer is full.

Case in point, I purchased a Kingston NV2 250G M.2 2280 NVMe Internal SSD | PCIe 4.0 Gen 4×4 and since I could never really test the speed other than with Crystal Disk Mark AND I only used the default setting of 1 Gig/s test file, I thought I was getting the full speed all along. Since all of my drives were SATA, SATA rates were the fastest I could see.

That was until I purchased the Fikwot FN960 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4. Then I had something to transfer to and from. And right away, I noticed there was a problem somewhere, and it was the Kingston drive. After the buffer filled up, the speed dropped to SATA speed.

I tested the Kingston with a 32 gig test file with Crystal Disk Mark and confirmed the problem. Be sure you to test with a large file when using Crystal Disk Mark if you want to see the real world transfer tests. It takes a lot longer, but it may flush out a problem.

This is a Crystal Mark Test of the Kingston NVMe using 1 Gig.

This is a Crystal Mark Test of the Kinston NVMe using 32 Gig. Notice the drop off.

I recently purchased an off brand Fikwot FN960 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.4 drive and I am getting full read and write speeds, approximately 3.5Gig/s, which is excellent considering my PC is a 2015 I7-7700K and PCIe Gen 3X4. I’m sure if this was a newer PC it would have even better results.

Reply | Quote